Shortly after Senate Republicans met with HHS Secretary Tom Price, Rep. Mark Sanford (R-NC) unveiled his companion bill to Sen.
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Paul and Sanford’s bill focuses heavily on the expansion of health savings accounts (HSAs), which are medical savings accounts.
The new proposal from the House Freedom Caucus will put pressure on Ryan and more mainstream Republicans to accelerate the timetable for accomplishing that campaign promise.
Ryan spoke the morning after the House Freedom Caucus unanimously agreed to insist on a fresh vote on a bill that Obama vetoed previous year.
A major fault in the Obamacare legislation is its failure to decouple health insurance from employment, he said.
House Republican leaders say they want to produce a bill by March that repeals Obamacare and includes proposals to expand health savings accounts and ease the sale of insurance across state lines, said Representative David Brat, a Virginia Republican and member of the Freedom Caucus. Paul and Sanford said these pooling mechanisms will decrease costs for consumers.
Rep. Sanford previewed his plan in an op-ed at Rare on Tuesday where he also emphasized the same aspects of the legislation. While he’s voted in the past to repeal Obamacare without one, he said it’s different now that it could actually happen. Meadows also said that he and his members might demand simultaneous action on repeal and replacement legislation – something virtually impossible to achieve.
“This is the replacement plan we want to not only promote, but to debate and hopefully fine-tune to make sure that we meet the needs for Americans”, Freedom Caucus Chairman Meadows told reporters Wednesday.
For example, the A Better Way plan calls for a refundable tax credit to help people purchase insurance in the individual marketplace.
“I think what most of the members wanted to know are what are the details -we talk conceptually a lot, but the members that aren’t on the committees of jurisdiction haven’t seen as much of the details as those of us that serve on Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means and Education and Workforce”, he told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
The hard-line conservatives’ rationale for backing the bill is partly that it exists, while at this point the frequently re-branded plan from GOP leadership does not.
Because the repeal bill is part of the fiscal year 2017 budget, Congress can not begin work on the fiscal year 2018 budget with 2017 unresolved, he said.
“If we don’t repeal Obamacare, then what was our fight about for the last six years?” asked Rep. Raúl R. Labrador (R-Idaho).
Many conservatives have grown exhausted of waiting for House leaders to follow through on their campaign promises to repeal the ACA.
As Politico and the Huffington Post reported, the House Freedom Caucus, a group of 40-50 staunch conservatives who have held up Republican legislation in the past, officially endorsed a 2015 bill that had been vetoed by Barack Obama to be used for repealing the ACA under President Donald Trump. I think the policy embodied in that is something that I agree with.
“This is a big, big day for conservative Republicans”, Paul told reporters Thursday. “But I think if you’re going to completely repeal something, you should replace it”.
In January, while Obama was still in office, both houses of Congress voted to begin the repeal process with the next step of having relevant committees produce pieces of each chamber’s version. We already did it once.
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From the beginning, it was always assumed that the Republicans would have a much tougher time pushing a budget resolution and related legislation through the Senate than the House.
